Agnieszka Soltysik,
University of Lausanne
Poe’s Aesthetics and American Modernism
The larger issue framing this essay is that of the state of aesthetic theory today,
but I will begin for reasons that will be clear by the end of this essay by looking
at Poe’s complicated relationship to American modernism. It is now generally
acknowledged that “American modernism,” like “modernism” itself, was a
much more complex and contradictory phenomenon than the singular term
implies. One speaks now of “American modernisms.” This essay is meant to
contribute to an understanding of some of the overlooked fractures within
American modernism by examining how Poe was read by several of its key
figures. To be schematic about it, this reception broke down into two different
camps: there were those who scoffed at Poe and called him immature, juvenile
and vulgar (such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters and the English
writer Aldous Huxley), and there were those who admired him and took him
seriously (such as Willa Cather and William Carlos Williams). I will propose
that one of the subtexts in the negative reception of Poe was related to the
gender politics of American modernism. By this I refer to the premium it placed
on masculinity and the masculinization of the profession of writer-artist.1 I will
also propose that the dramatically different responses Poe inspired point to
unexamined differences within modernism regarding the nature of the aesthetic
experience. To put it quite simply, Poe brings into focus what we can call the
asceticism of some modernists and the more sensualist aesthetics of others. The
final objective of this essay will be an invitation to rethink some of our
assumptions, many of which we have derived from modernism, about the
experience of what we call “the aesthetic.”
I will begin with a truism that is found in most textbooks these days, namely,
that Poe represents the earliest and one of the few American examples of
aestheticism, the idea of “art for art’s sake.” Although the aesthetic movement
called l’art pour l’art is associated with Théophile Gautier and his circle of
bohemian friends in France in the 1830s, it can (and should) be traced back to
1
An important essay on Poe’s subversive treatment of masculinity is David Leverenz’s “Poe
and Gentry Virginia.” Paul Lauter’s discussion of how Melville was canonized in the 1920s
in From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park also helps us to understand why Poe was a more
difficult figure for American modernists to embrace. Lauter argues that Melville’s South Sea
adventures, whaling ships, and overwhelmingly male-focused prose made him represent a
male artist that heroically resisted the feminizing corruptions of commercial authorship, while
Poe seemed too close to feminized mass culture in his journalism and his more accessible
fiction.
Emmanuel Kant’s Third Critique and the privileged place he gives to aesthetic
judgment as a mediation between Pure and Practical reason (the subject of the
first and second critiques, respectively) and as a bridge between the material
world and the “Transcendental.” The aesthetic experience – especially that of
the sublime even more than that of the beautiful – intimated the existence of a
higher spiritual realm. During the “play of the mental powers” that the aesthetic
judgment mobilizes, the subject feels an intuition of a higher “finality” or
purpose of human life (Kant, The Critique of Judgment 71). The true aesthetic
experience, as many of us learned as students, is that of “disinterested
contemplation.” It should give us pause that this term never actually occurs as
such in Kant’s work (coming rather from later popularizers of Kant’s work),
even though the notion of disinterestedness (an attitude untainted by personal
interest or utilitarian considerations) clearly is important to Kant.
This insistence on disinterestedness, so important to modernist aesthetics, can
be historicized by reading Kant in the context of his own historical and cultural
moment. For example, eighteenth-century philosophers often wrestled with the
problem of relativism in taste, and it is clear from their writings that European
contact with colonial cultural “Others” was one of the triggers for this crisis of
aesthetic judgment. In the case of Kant, the figure that haunts the Third Critique
is the Iroquois who comes to Paris and likes nothing so much as the restaurants
(Third Critique 43). The implication is that Europe’s magnificent churches and
peerless artistic production fail to impress the “savage” as much as a good meal
because it gives him more direct pleasure. This passing reference to Native
Americans is undeveloped, but its rhetorical force should not be underestimated.
The point that Kant wants to make is that the uncultured person cannot rise
above his personal bodily pleasures and appreciate something in a wholly
abstract and impersonal way.
Another way to historicize Kant’s preoccupation with disinterestedness is to
read it in the context of the cultural values being promulgated by the
bourgeoning merchant middle class. In this reading, Kant can be said to have
privileged the aesthetic as a form of resistance to the logic of interest and
industry. Its very language, e.g. “play of mental faculties,” suggests its
oppositional function to the consolidating middle class ethic of work,
seriousness, and profit. The concept of play would become very important for
certain German Romantics, notably Schiller, who was an important influence on
Poe. Schiller developed the concept of play in art to a value in itself, and
advocated especially (in defiance of classical aesthetics) the mixing of genres
and tones in order to create more complex situations of aesthetic play. I mention
this because it will become important for understanding Poe’s mixing of tone,
especially of the gothic and the comic, as in “The Raven.”
For now, I want to continue my genealogy of the aesthetic by reminding readers
how the Art for Art’s Sake movement in France arose as a fierce reaction
against capitalism. Gautier and his circle used the l’art pour l’art slogan not so
much as a fleshed-out aesthetic theory, but, as one critic puts it, as “a rallying
cry” for artists who “felt the need to express their hatred of bourgeois
mercantilism and vulgar utilitarianism” (Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity
45). Gautier wrote in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) that “il n’y
a de vraiment beau que ce qui peut server à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid”
(Calinescu 45). While this is rooted in Kant’s Romanticism, it takes things
much farther than Kant. It is not an ideal of disinterestedness so much as an
aggressive assertion of art’s gratuitousness, its total resistance to the logic of
profit and use-value. The famous slogan to emerge from Gautier’s circle was
“épater le bourgeois” or “shock the middle class.” The aesthetic experience
Gautier favored was not contemplation, disinterested or otherwise, but an
electric jolt to the sensibilities of the bourgeois subject. Many modern art and
anti-art movements such as Dada, Surrealism and various kinds of avant-garde
have returned to the concept of shock as an aesthetic. The discourse around the
need to startle or appall the audience was always that of “awakening” the
bourgeois subject out of his or her capitalist false consciousness, complacency
or ideological dream-sleep.
One of the many paradoxes of modernity and modernism is that the very
autonomy of the aesthetic sphere may have in fact been a necessary and logical
component of the way capitalism functions as an ideological system. This has
been the theory advanced by critics such as Terry Eagleton. In The Ideology of
the Aesthetic (1990), Eagleton argues that modern art’s apparent indifference to
practical life served in fact to clear the way for commercial and capitalist
ideology to take over all aspects of practical culture, including ironically much
that is artistic (such as the stage, publishing, cinema, and so on). In this view,
the concept of the autonomy of art was a necessary precondition for the total
domination of society by the logic and practice of profit and consumption. In
short, the relationship between art and capitalism, or culture and economics, in
modernity can best be described as a complex and paradoxical dialectic of
resistance and collaboration.
No writer raises these issues of aesthetics and commercialism and their
ambivalent interpenetration more tellingly and effectively than Edgar Allan Poe.
A Kantian in many respects, a contemporary of Gautier’s, a consummately
professional artist, unique among his American contemporaries for his concern
with the aesthetic specificity of literature, Poe was also a commercial writer. He
worked for a living, often paid by the line or number words, obliged to write
innumerable reviews of just about every kind of book printed at the time, and
always in the context of commercial literary journalism. Having the misfortune
to live through one of the worst financial crises of the century (that of 1837), he
saw his dream of founding an independent literary magazine crash with the
economy. This, more than anything else, including his much exaggerated
drinking problem, was the real reason Poe lived and died in soul-crushing
poverty. Given his position as professional and commercial writer, what does it
mean to say that Poe advocated aestheticism or art for art’s sake? Taken in the
immediate context of American Romanticism and antebellum literary culture, it
meant first and foremost that Poe felt that art should not be judged primarily in
terms of its capacity to teach and uplift. In “Philosophy of Composition” (1846),
this is expressed in the argument that Beauty is an “elevation of the soul—not of
intellect, or of heart” (Essays and Reviews 16). In other words, the beautiful is
not meant to instruct (“elevate the intellect”) or make people feel better
(“elevate the heart”), specifications that must be understood in the context of the
prevailing antebellum taste for didactic and sentimental art. But what does it
mean to “elevate the soul”? What is the “soul” as opposed to the “intellect”? By
distinguishing it from the rational and the sentimental, Poe implies that there is
yet another kind of feeling or emotion that is stimulated by art, something that is
perhaps related to the spirit. Whatever it is, the aesthetic experience is clearly
some kind of mental sensation.
Looking at Poe’s critical work as a whole, one word appears more often than
any other in conjunction to the aesthetic: “effect.” For example, the full
sentence in “Philosophy of Composition” reads: “When, indeed, men speak of
Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they
refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or
of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in
consequence of contemplating ‘the beautiful’” (Essays and Reviews 16). In
other words, the “elevation of the soul” is an “effect,” and an “intense and
pure” one. Yet, there is something circular about this definition (of the
“elevation of soul” as “effect,” and of “effect” as an intense and pure elevation
of soul).
In order to understand better what Poe meant by “effect,” we must begin by
noting that Poe understands the respective aesthetic objectives and effects of
prose and of poetry as distinct. In prose, and more specifically, in the short
story, the effect of a text is related to its climax or dénouement. When Poe says
that every line of a story should contribute to its effect, he really means that
every detail of the story should be helping to set up the dramatic impact of the
ending. If one thinks of all the best-known and widely anthologized Poe stories,
this is clearly a common denominator: “The Fall of the House of Usher,”
“Ligeia” and “Berenice.” All depend on the shock factor of a final cataclysmic
revelation: Madeleine arriving at the door, Rowena’s blond hair turning black as
Ligeia possesses her body, or the teeth falling out of the narrator’s box and onto
the floor in “Berenice.” This last example is unparalleled in demonstrating
Poe’s purpose: the narrator’s absurd description of the teeth as “thirty-two
small, white and ivory-looking substances” obliges the reader to “decode” and
therefore recognize the teeth him or herself, giving the revelation all the more
immediacy and force for having occurred in the reader’s mind. This recognition
is thus the occasion for the frisson or thrill that Poe developed as the sine qua
non of the short story.
Let us examine this sensational effect for a moment. On the surface of things, it
does not seem to have much to do with the disinterested contemplation
described by Kant. And indeed, this is precisely what Yvor Winters will take
Poe to task for in the 1930s.2 Winters reproaches Poe with failing to
“understand the moral basis of art” and with seeing art as “a kind of stimulant,
ingeniously concocted, which may, if one is lucky, raise one to a moment of
divine delusion” (Winters 123). But in the 1830s, when Poe is writing, the
thrilling effect of his short fiction could seem to Poe as the very essence of the
aesthetic effect postulated by Kant. Kant had not yet become identified with an
absence of emotion, which is the specific reading of Kant’s aesthetic that has
become commonplace in the twentieth century and which we owe to the way
modernism privileged lack of affect as a way of distinguishing its aesthetics
from the sentimental fiction and art that dominated the nineteenth century. In
the 1830s, Kant represented something else besides a lack of emotion: he
represented seeing art as important in itself and as divorced from thought and
usefulness and morality, but not as divorced from feeling. In fact, the aesthetic
was for Kant and for the Romantics a kind of feeling, but a specific one: it was,
more precisely, a specific kind of excitement. Thus, for Poe, good art is like a
stimulant.
It might help to recall that the aesthetic was never opposed to bodily sensation
in classical or Renaissance aesthetic theory. In fact, the Greek word aisthesis
refers not to the domain of conceptual experience, but to sensual perception.3 In
short, aesthetics is etymologically rooted in bodily experience. Looked at it this
way, the thrill or frisson created by a Poe story is not a vulgar departure from
the aesthetic but one of its most realized instances.
Poe elevated the sensational ending to a master formula for short fiction, and
indeed, is generally credited with having thereby invented or at least
consolidated the form of the modern short story. Two paradoxical things can be
2
Yvor Winters, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism,” first
published in American Literature in 1937, and reprinted in Graham Clarke’s Edgar Allan
Poe: Critical Assessments, vol. IV, pp. 117-135.
3
Based on Terry Eagleton’s discussion of the aesthetic in The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(1990), p. 13.
said about this formula. One is that it bears a more than superficial resemblance
to the l’art pour l’art movement, notably in the desire to shock or startle the
middle class reader (“épater le bourgeois”). Not only does Poe subordinate
every other consideration in the creative process to the production of an
aesthetic effect, he also creates his effect by undeniably shocking means:
gruesome violence, torture, bodily disintegration or substitution, mutilation, and
so on. Moreover, critics have noted the fiercely parodic nature of Poe’s endings
in relation to the most sacred orthodoxies of nineteenth-century sentimental
fiction, especially that of the beloved hero or heroine dying in bed surrounded
by grieving friends. This iconic image from sentimental culture is the subject of
Poe’s relentless subversion, from Ligeia’s occult desecration of Rowena’s
deathbed to the gruesome mesmeric experiments on Mr. Valdemar which result
in his being transformed at the end into a gruesome puddle of putrefaction.4
What makes Poe’s aesthetic of the sensational ending even more paradoxical is
the fact that it is the result of consummately commercial considerations. I
mentioned earlier that Poe wrote fiction mainly because it paid better than
poetry; the short story was for Poe a means of making a livelihood by writing
other than journalism and reviews. It was the only way of writing creatively and
being paid for it, and the sensational ending was mainly an extension of that
logic. In fact, the dramatic ending was the solution that Poe found to an
authorial dilemma that has only recently come to be appreciated, namely, the
heterogeneous composition of his audience. Terence Whalen’s monograph on
Poe’s relation to the literary marketplace is particularly instructive on this point.
In Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999), Whalen demonstrates through
archival analysis of subscription receipts and similar documents that the
subscribers of the magazine for which Poe wrote spanned different regions,
classes, and educational levels. Part of the Poe legend for a long time was the
myth that Poe despised the masses and was himself despised by them,
exemplifying the American version of the poète maudit, the misunderstood and
mistreated Romantic artist. Although Poe had his detractors as well as his
admirers in the 1830s and 40s, he was no alienated poet holed up in his alcove
writing to future generations. On the contrary, Poe was wholly immersed in the
literary and cultural life of his time, writing on various subjects for various
journals and for a demographically wide audience. Most of the journals he
worked for attempted to create marketing identities that straddled the North and
South and aimed at something like national circulation (which Whalen uses to
buttress his argument about the circumspect nature of most of Poe’s printed
comments about slavery). Even more importantly, these magazines were
4
See, for example, Jonathan Elmer’s “Terminate or Liquidate?: Poe, Sensationalism, and the
Sentimental Tradition” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn
Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995).
obliged to appeal to a wider audience than the literati of the period, soliciting
and sustaining subscriptions from a wide swath of middle class and literate (but
not cultivated) readers.
It is instructive that Poe distinguishes in his criticism between the tastes of the
masses (by which he means this broad base of middle class readers) and the
tastes of what he calls the “literary people” (Essays and Reviews 871). For
example, in an 1845 review of his own Tales, Poe notes that “the literary
people” enjoyed “The Fall of the House of Usher,” while “the mass” enjoyed
the more suspenseful “The Gold-Bug” or “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The
explanation he offers for the difference is that the more popular stories rely on
“unbroken interest, [and] novelty,” while the “Fall of the House of Usher” has a
“grand and impressive “dénôument [sic]” (Essays and Reviews 870). In other
words, the two stories more popular with “the masses” sustain interest in a more
consistent way throughout the narrative while “Usher” appeals to more refined
readers who can bear the long build-up in which nothing much happens until the
very end. However, as Poe stresses here and in other critical essays, both
audiences shared an appreciation for the sensational or climactic ending.
Thus, the solution for bridging the gap between this otherwise disparate public
is to emphasize the lowest common denominator of successful effect: the
dramatic climax. In this respect, it could be argued that Poe’s aesthetics in the
short story are not only commercial, but also consummately democratic. The
taste of the “literary people” for a long build-up and sensational ending is
coupled with the way Poe’s stories are written to be widely accessible and
understandable. In 1842, Poe wrote in a review of Longfellow that “every work
of art should contain within itself all that is requisite for its own
comprehension” (Essays and Reviews 691). Although Poe has been faulted for
being difficult to understand, and Yvor Winters goes so far as to call him an
“obscurantist,” this is all the more ironic considering Poe is often dismissed by
the same critics for writing for adolescent boys, that is, for being too facile and
obvious. It seems to me that Poe’s reputation as juvenile fiction is indicative of
something so obvious that has been overlooked: his ability to make
linguistically sophisticated and powerful tales that are almost universally
accessible. Though often intensely ironic because of their use of unreliable
narrators, Poe’s short stories are nevertheless generally understandable by the
least sophisticated of readers.
I have discussed Poe’s theory of aesthetic effect in the short story up to now. I
want to turn to Poe’s aesthetics of verse for a moment. Although he also often
incorporated a kind of dramatic structure that led up to a climactic ending in his
poems, and we see this clearly in “The Conqueror Worm” and “The Raven,” a
sensational ending is not the main effect that he strives for in his poetry. Instead,
like the Symbolists that followed after him in France, Poe considered an effect
of musical and suggestive indefiniteness as the highest objective of poetry. Poe
saw poetry as a kind of music created by words, in which sound outweighs
sense in importance. Thus, the aesthetic effect created by poetry had little to do
with its literal or even figurative meaning, but everything to do with its rhythm,
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, euphony, and sound. For Poe, the beauty and
pleasure of poetry is not an intellectual experience so much as a sensuous one.
For example, in “The Rationale of Verse” (1848), Poe distinguishes Beauty
from Truth and Passion, and insists that the latter two must always be
subservient to the former, which is “the atmosphere and the essence of the
poem” (Essays and Reviews 17).
We can turn for a moment to Poe’s popular masterpiece, “The Raven” (1845),
in order to appreciate how this works. Anyone who has read or heard this poem
will remember its catchy rhythm, its irresistible repetition of trochees, and its
refrain, the word “Nevermore.” A recent critic has argued that the powerful
trochaic rhythm of the poem actually undermines the comprehensibility of the
poem. According to Richard Godden, we may hear, but cannot “listen to what
the poem says” because the rhythm displaces attention from the meaning
(Godden 997). In my view, Godden exaggerates the poem’s hypnotic power, but
the fact remains that “The Raven” owes much of its success to its sound effects.
In this respect, it is comparable to Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1859),
Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (1871), and the larger European context of early
modernism concerned with exploring the power and playfulness of the sound of
poetry.
Placing “The Raven” in the company of Rossett’s pseudo-nursery rhyme and
Carroll’s nonsense poem brings into focus an aspect of Poe’s poem that has
been a perennial stumbling block for critics: its silliness or self-irony. Critics
have frequently resorted to the word “ludicrous” when searching for a way to
describe the poem’s failure to maintain a properly serious sense of itself. Poe
himself uses this word in “Philosophy of Composition” to describe the raven’s
entrance into the room, acknowledging that he is treading a fine line between
the fantastic and the facetious. Modern readers sometimes imagine that Poe’s
contemporaries took the poem more seriously than twentieth-century readers,
but it seems clear from reviews that the poem has always been read as an
exquisite mixture of the melancholic, the gothic, and the absurd.
This curious combination can be approached in a number of different ways. One
that I mentioned earlier would be to read Poe in the context of German
Romantic theory and the premium placed on play and genre-mixing by critics
such as Schiller and the two Schlegel brothers. For example, Friedrich Schlegel
identifies the combination of burlesque with tragedy as a particularly effective
combination:
There is a kind of bizarreness of enthusiasm that is compatible with the
greatest refinement and freedom, and that not only intensifies tragedy but
makes it beautiful, and, as it were, deifies it: like Goethe’s Bride of Corinth,
which is an epoch in the history of poetry. What moves one in that work
lacerates and nevertheless is seductively fascinating. Some parts could almost
be called burlesque, and it is precisely in these parts that the horrible seems
overwhelmingly great. (“Fragments” 730)
Schlegel argues that the “burlesque” or “bizarre” moments in Goethe’s poem
not only do not detract from its tragic effect, but intensify it, make it more
beautiful, and “deify” it (which, for a Romantic like Schlegel, probably means
“more spiritual” or “transcendental”). Poe’s work is replete with such moments,
and nowhere more so than in “The Raven.”
Jonathan Elmer’s reading of “The Raven” proposes that the poem deconstructs
its own aesthetic effects as it performs them. Elmer argues that the poem
deliberately produces an effect of excessive artificiality in order to demystify
the process of how poems generate meaning and create the illusion of
authenticity, truth, and coherence as formal effects of language (Reading at the
Social Limit 212). One of the strengths of Elmer’s reading is that it tries to
account for the suspicious and radically mixed reception of the poem, especially
the way it has been accused of being worthless kitsch. It is the “jingle” Whitman
was undoubtedly thinking of when he called Poe a “jingle man.” The word
“jingle” itself is simply another synonym for kitsch, implying art that is
commercial: easy to consume, catchy, and superficial. This is how detractors of
Poe have often read “The Raven,” as the work of a childish mind, a case of
arrested development—or, alternatively, as the work of a con-man, a cynical
literary P.T. Barnum, whose texts are traps and hoaxes rather than serious art.
With the concept of kitsch, I have jumped from the 1830s to the turn of the
twentieth century, because it is really with modernism that the whole question
of high art and commercial art, or true art and kitsch, becomes one of the central
axes of aesthetic thought. Here I arrive at the main concern of this essay, which
is the curiously polarized reception that Poe had at the hands of the American
modernists. Unlike Anglo-Americans modernists, the French did not feel any
great ambivalence about Poe. On the contrary, thanks to Baudelaire’s efforts in
the 1840s and 50s, Poe has enjoyed a popularity and esteem in France that was
unimaginable in the United States. Mallarmé translated and published “The
Raven” in 1875 with Edouard Manet’s illustrations. Paul Verlaine credited
Poe’s “Eureka” with being the text that changed his life when he was a young
man. And Poe’s cultural capital on the other side of the Atlantic only rose
higher with the arrival of Modernism proper at the turn of the century. A
phenomenon that can only be called Poe-mania swept France and continental
Europe: Paul Gauguin, Alfred Kubin, Georg Grosz, Max Ernst, and René
Magritte are among the best known of the innumerable modernists who
expressed an admiration, enthusiasm, or simply a huge debt to Poe and his
work.
In contrast to this appreciation and adulation, English and American critics
remained cautious or contemptuous about Poe’s work, claiming to be mystified
by Poe’s great favor abroad. I will begin by quoting three of the most arresting
examples:
For American readers, furthermore, Baudelaire is compromised by
his having made himself the apostle of our own Edgar Poe.
… it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain
degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. An
enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive
stage of reflection. (My italics; Henry James, 209)
Poe is indeed a stumbling block for the judicious critic.
If we examine his work in detail, we seem to find in it
nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking unsupported
by wide reading or profound scholarship, haphazard
experiments in various types of writing, chiefly under
pressure of financial need, without perfection in any detail.
(My italics; T.S. Eliot, 263)
They [Poe’s stories] are all studies in hysteria; they are
written for the sake of the hysteria . . . For the rest we are
met on every page of his poetry with such resounding
puerilities as the “pallid bust of Pallas,” and the “viol,
the violet, and the vine.” (My italics; Yvor Winters, 132)
All three critics reproach Poe for immaturity and a lack of seriousness:
“primitive stage of reflection,” “puerile thinking,” “puerilities.” More
specifically, he is accused of lacking proper self-control: his writing is
“haphazard,” “slipshod,” and “hysterical.” One way to read these male
modernists’ reactions to Poe is in terms of some kind of gender panic. By
accusing Poe of not being mature, masterful, serious and adult, they are
accusing him of not being a man. Paul Lauter has suggested that “nothing was
more important” to American intellectuals of the 1920s than “masculinizing
American culture,” and especially the figure of the writer (From Walden Pond
to Jurassic Park 217). According to Lauter, Melville was canonized at
precisely this moment because he was perceived as difficult, uncompromising
toward his audience, and “a densely allusive composer whose precious treasures
would be yielded up, as with other modernist texts, only to learned initiates”
(Lauter 217). In this critical context privileging textual resistance and opacity,
Poe’s highly accessible poetry and prose could only be seen as the sub-literary
pyrotechnics of a callow interloper in the house of letters.
However, there were two sides of the Anglo-American modernist reception of
Poe. For example, English playwright George Bernard Shaw argued that Poe’s
is the first name in the American Pantheon and credited Poe with creating a
“world-record for the English language” in his short stories (Shaw 220-221).
Willa Cather wrote in 1895 that Poe was “our only master of pure prose” and,
with the exception of Lowell, “our only great poet” (Cather 204). Finally, in
1925, William Carlos Williams wrote in his collection of essays, In the
American Grain:
Poe’s work strikes by its scrupulous originality, not “originality”
in the bastard sense, but in its legitimate sense of solidity which
goes back to the ground, a conviction that he can judge for
himself.
Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature
is serious, not a matter of courtesy or truth.
Poe was unsophisticated, when contrasted with the puerile
sophistications of a Lowell. It is a beginning he has in mind,
a juvenescent local literature. (216-217)
Here we have, almost point by point, a refutation of the charges against Poe by
Williams’ modernist contemporaries. Where Eliot and James see immaturity,
Williams sees solid and independent judgment. Where they see frivolousness,
Williams sees the first seriousness in American literature. Where they see
puerility, Williams sees a foundational gesture, a clearing of the ground in order
to make way for a new literature.
One could just attribute Williams’ admiration and Eliot’s and James’ rejection
of Poe to personal taste and leave it at that. However, I want to explore a
possible avenue of speculation by going back to the question of aesthetics. In
this framework, something that emerges as a common denominator among
James, Eliot, and Winters is a conviction that literature has a profoundly moral
and intellectual function and that the proper aesthetic response therefore is one
of intellectual contemplation. Winters describes poetry as a “refined and
enriched technique of moral comprehension” and repeatedly describes its ideal
effect as creating some sort of “moral sublimity” (Winters, “Edgar Allan Poe”
122-123). The trouble with Poe, Winters argues, is “traceable to Poe’s failure to
understand the moral basis of art, to his view of art as a kind of stimulant,
ingeniously concocted, which may, if one is lucky, raise one to a moment of
divine delusion” (125). Winters objects to the idea of art as a stimulant, and
takes Poe to task in particular for seeing style and subject matter in a poem as
inseparable or even appearing to favor style over subject matter, insisting
instead that the proper aesthetic attitude is one of intelligent attention to what a
poem actually says. I grant that Winters should not be taken as a spokesman for
all modernists, or even for Eliot and James, who would probably feel
uncomfortable with Winters’ moralism in these quotations. However, if we look
at Eliot’s and James’ work, we do find a preference for the ironic and detached
reception of art, an attention to the minutiae of moral psychology, and a distinct
unease with the body and its pleasures. There is no better illustration of this than
“The Waste Land” and its discomfort with sexuality and women, its
homophobia, and its conception of salvation as a vast library.
It is a commonplace of modernist studies that poets like Hart Crane and William
Carlos Williams wrote in reaction to “The Waste Land.” It is generally
understood that what they objected to in that brilliant and influential poem was
its pessimism about modernity. Hart Crane, for example, supposedly wrote The
Bridge (1932) to counter Eliot’s dark view of the modern urban landscape with
a celebration of the beauty and vital, synthetic and symbolic power of the
Brooklyn Bridge. Similarly, Williams wrote Paterson (1946-1958) in order to
refute the idea of the modern city as a waste land with a lovingly detailed verse
epic of the daily life of a mid-sized industrial town.
What is less obvious about Crane’s and Williams’ difference from Eliot is that
there is also a different aesthetic theory behind their work. If Eliot means his
poem to be a refuge of civilized intelligence against modern barbarism, both
Crane and Williams see poetry and the aesthetic experience as more sensuous,
sensual, concrete, fleshy, and asking something different from the reader
besides ironic and disinterested contemplation. Crane, for example, asks his
readers to use something else besides their reason. His opacity and densely
packed metaphors oblige readers to confront the materiality of the poem itself,
and to intuit rather than decipher the meaning of its opaque language.
Williams’ sensuousness is very different from Crane’s, and does not lie in the
thickness or difficulty of his poetic language. On the contrary, Williams is an
easy and pleasurable read, and his love of the senses expresses itself in a certain
epicurean sensibility that permeates his work. A good example is “This Is Just
to Say”:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The poem playfully takes the form of a note left on a refrigerator or kitchen
table. In describing the deliciousness, sweetness, and coldness of the plums, the
poem assumes a shared understanding of the sensuous pleasures of food. The
speaker confesses having given in to the irresistible desire to eat the plums and
asks the reader (addressee) for forgiveness by trying to express how good they
were. The last stanza attempts to conjure up the sensation of the deliciousness of
cold, sweet plums in the reader. Such pure, naked, guiltless sensuality is hard to
imagine in Eliot’s or James’ work.
Willa Cather’s previously quoted article on Poe is similarly sympathetic to an
aesthetics of sensation and emotion. Cather asks:
Where lived another man who could blend the beautiful
and the horrible, the gorgeous and the grotesque in such
an intricate and inexplicable fashion? Who could delight
you with his noun and disgust you with his verb, thrill you
with his adjective and chill you with his adverb, make
you run the whole gamut of human emotions in a single
sentence? (“Edgar Allan Poe” 204)
Cather’s point here is that Poe was a “mighty master of the organ of language”
and could create a whole range of emotional effects with precision. What is
striking in this passage is the underlying assumption that such diverse emotional
effects as delight, disgust, thrills and chills (all very physical), are the legitimate
province of literary aesthetics. In this Cather differs pointedly from other
modernists who wished to disentangle serious literature from the bodily
pleasures offered by popular entertainment (of which there is no better
illustration than the scorn Huxley heaps on the multi-sensory “feelies” in Brave
New World).
To recapitulate, I am suggesting that there were modernists who valued
primarily an aesthetics of irony and detachment, and there were modernists who
valued an aesthetics of sensation. This brings me to my final point, which is that
the field of aesthetics, that is, the study of the experience unique to our
responsiveness to art objects, is woefully undertheorized. When we look at how
little has been added to the subject since Kant’s Third Critique, we begin to
understand how extraordinary his attempt was to isolate and scrutinize the
attitude, state of mind, or pleasurable attention that is specific to human
responsiveness to works of art.
Nevertheless, extraordinary as his achievement was, I would suggest that we
have taken certain aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory, such as disinterestedness
and inutility, too seriously for too long. As I proposed earlier, these concepts
should be read historically as part of a backlash against the capitalist values of
self-interest and use-value which seemed to be taking over all aspects of cultural
life. The desire to free art from the logic of instrumentalism and subjectivity is
a laudable one, and literary critics have been correct in valuing it, but perhaps
we have over-estimated disinterestedness and autonomy while overlooking
other things that art can make us feel and do. Maybe by remaining suspicious
and dismissive of the emotional and social effects of the aesthetic we have
undermined our ability to think critically about any effects besides the most
abstract. It is true that recent years have seen what is called sometimes the
return of the aesthetic, a reaction to the insistently ideological and sociological
concerns of cultural studies and its many sister disciplines. But has the new
aesthetic turn really brought a better understanding of aesthetic experience?
Much of it seems to be a defensive retreat into the old fortifications, reinvesting
critical energy into the notions of quality, value and other ways of
distinguishing “good” art from “bad” or commercial art. This focus on “quality”
simply plays into the hands of disciplines such as anthropology, whose scholars
would deny the existence of the aesthetic experience as a distinct experience,
subsuming it instead to other forms of tribal identity assertion such as sport,
class and religion.
Yet, assuming that there is something specific that occurs when we read or look
at a work of art, it seems that we are curiously inarticulate about it. Channeling
my final question through Williams’ enigmatic modernist master-poem, I
wonder why, if “so much depends/ upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with
rain/water/beside the white/chickens,” then why do we have so few words for it
besides Kant’s two favorite (“beautiful” and “sublime”)? This brief look at
Poe’s emotional aesthetics and its violently ambivalent reception by AngloAmerican modernism is offered as an invitation to rethink the asceticism of our
notions of the aesthetic.
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